via John (and Stanley)

During this week as I've been preparing for sunday morning I've been confronted by John the Baptist. Every Advent, there is John standing in our way. The church says to get to Jesus we have to go via John. John makes us uncomfortable because he doesn't avoid saying hard things. In a season where the pressure is to prepare the annual christmas talk about the love of God found in a baby's birth to those once-a-year-church-goers, John says 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near' and 'the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire'. Hands up who wants to the preach that! Where perhaps we want to wrap our message in shiny paper in a desperate attempt to be relevant and welcoming, John says its time to change our ways, our direction, our life because there is a new world arriving, which is coming with one more powerful than him with a winnowing fork in his hand. The advent carol 'On Jordan's bank the Baptist cry' suggests John brings 'glad tidings from the King of kings'. Well I guess so. Stanley Hauerwas (who has some similar traits to the Baptist) and William Willimon in their widely-read book Resident Aliens say this:

Earlier we noted how the church is dying a slow death at the hands of pastors who are nice ... Indeed, one of us is tempted to think that there is not much wrong with the church that could not be cured by God calling about a hundred really insentitive, uncaring, and offensive people into the ministry! [Me: some might be tempted to say we are not short of those!]
A better way is for us to be so confident that the gospel is true that we dare not say less to the people we are called to serve.

The church says to get to Jesus we have to go via John. So this advent season let us not avoid John and his hard words (if we think John is hard, it doesn't get any easier with Jesus!) and those of us who are called to preach and lead worship let us not airbrush John out of the way, but let him speak. To return to Stanley, the description of him by the magazine The Door in 1993 reminds me of John and why every second sunday of the church year we listen to him:

'Stanley is a loud, blustery, locomotive of passion for the Gospel; his eyes deep, intense, penetrating, full of sparkle and fire; his discourses passion-filled, spluttering with expletives, crashing into everyone else's opinion in the room, his thoughts thundering into your consciousness - sometimes against your will, often making you angry at his lack of ... well ... senstivity. And yet. And yet ... You realize this is man who is so in love with the Gospel - so in its grip - that he must say what he says or the rocks will say it for him. There is such clarity about Stanley Hauerwas. You have no doubts about what he thinks, about what he believes. And, there is no question in our minds that his clarity often leaves him alone, isolated from those whose ideas are of the mind and not of the heart. There are times when he spoke that a kind of holiness filled the room and you knew you were hearing the words of a prophet ...'

The Word of God comes to . . . who?

In the 15^th year of the emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea, when Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip prince of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias prince of Abilene, during high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. Luke 3:1-2

The evangelist Luke believes it is important to situate his story about Jesus in its wider historical context. Why else would he take such pains both here and in others parts of his Gospel, to inform us who the various important people are: emperors, governors, rulers, princes and high priests. Yet, whether he intends it or not, he sets up irony by first telling us who the powerful people are, what position they hold, and then informing us that the word of God came not to any of these but to John the Baptist in the wilderness. Compared to all these powerful and influential figures, John is a nobody. Yet it is to John that the word of God comes.

It would be like saying that in the 56^th year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, when David Milliband was Foreign Secretary and his brother Ed Milliband was Secretary of State, during the Archbishopric of Rowan Williams, the word of God came to Doris the open air preacher in rural Essex!

When those who should be open to God's Word are not; God bypasses them in favour of those who are open and courageous and obedient. However, to the hearers and readers of Luke’s Gospel, John is not a nobody. In chapters 1 and 2 we are introduced first to Zechariah, a priest, and then to his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the cousin of Mary who will be the mother of Jesus. Old and childless, Zechariah receives a visit from the angel Gabriel who announces that Elizabeth will conceive a bear a son to be called John. It is this John who is born and grows up to be a preacher in the wilderness. John goes all over the Jordan valley proclaiming that God’s chosen people need to turn away from their sinful ways of life, seek God’s forgiveness, and as a sign that they have done this they need to be baptised in water. John calls them to do this because he is preparing the way for the Messiah and the coming Kingdom of God. There are many ways through which we can prepare the way for God's Word to come to others: friendship, empathy, critique, service and honesty being some of them. It matters not who we are but whether we are open and willing.

Prepared ... In The Wilderness

It would be very easy to underestimate the importance of John the Baptist. Our four Gospels all highlight the pre-eminence of Jesus, and as Christians we would agree with that assessment. Yet John’s impact was immense. Josephus expends more column inches on John than he does on Jesus. When news reaches Herod of Jesus’ activities, Herod fears he is John the Baptist resurrected, whilst Peter offers John the Baptist as one possible explanation for who ‘people say the Son of Man is.’ Jesus appears to be understood with reference to John the Baptist and one wonders just how much sense Jesus of Nazareth would have made without the man in the open, uninhabited spaces by the Jordan, with his camel hair robe and his locust and wild honey diet.

Our Gospels don’t underestimate John. Each time the Good News of Jesus Christ is recorded, we find that the pathway to that Good News takes us past the baptizer. Each time he is understood with reference to Isaiah 40 and the message of comfort, tenderness and forgiveness. With the exception of forgiveness, this is at first glance somewhat surprising, for comfort and tenderness aren’t words which automatically spring to mind when I think of John.

Yet it is quite appropriate, for just as Isaiah 40 marks a turning point in the affairs of the people of Israel, in which God will do a new thing, something so surprising that they would never believe it, so John comes to announce a turning point in God’s dealings with a creation exiled from him, which will again be new and startling.

Yet perhaps more disturbing is the direction in which we are pointed in each case. We’re directed towards the wilderness, where the way is being prepared, the valleys are being lifted, the mountain and hills are being made low and the rough, uneven land smoothed out. A new era is breaking in, God’s glory will be revealed, the obstacles are, one by one, being overcome. But if we want to see it, if we want to be prepared, the place to look is in the wilderness.

It’s probably not where we want to be, but the wilderness is the place of preparation, where God can be heard away from the bustle and busyness, where God gets us ready for what is to come. The wilderness experience of the Exodus people who had left Egypt came to be seen as the place where they heard and saw God most clearly and were prepared to be God’s people. After his baptism Jesus is prepared for his ministry by being driven into the wilderness. At various key points in his ministry Jesus withdraws to seek God – and he withdraws into the wilderness.

And the wilderness can be the place where we start to see those promises come true. Just last week the lectionary pointed us towards the desire for God to rip open the heavens and come down. And before the end of Mark 1 we see that prayer answered, as the heavens are opened and the Spirit descends on Jesus. God reveals himself, to Jesus at least, in the wilderness.

How different from the preparations we normally associate with getting ready for Christmas. The shops seem to have been ready for ages. Even as staff started packed away pumpkins and witches outfits, Roy Wood was wishing it could be Christmas every day. Within a couple of weeks the question ‘are you ready for Christmas?’ will divide people into the smug and the panicking. When Christmas day comes we’ll have been celebrating Christmas for weeks. At best Advent has been merged into Christmas. Skip the preparations, let’s cut straight to the main event, to the shepherds, wise men and little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay. Ignore the wilderness.

Yet is we do, do we miss the chance to hear and see the Good news of the newness God can bring? It’s in the wilderness that we, with the people of Judea and Jerusalem get the chance to identify ourselves with the newness God offers. Without that, how do we even know we want what God has prepared for us? It is no foregone conclusion that wanting God to act and wanting what God does, particularly when he acts in new and surprising ways, is the same thing. It was in Judea and Jerusalem, the places where they’d flocked to identify with what God was doing, that God met most resistance when he did finally act in Christ. I wonder if I am any different?